the penguin fans found my old askblog art haha

i can't believe it's been 10 years...

Heres your reminder to use literally anything but chrome

And here's your reminder that Firefox actively works to protect your privacy and prevent tracking.

Firefox also has “Facebook fence” which is used to contain Facebook into isolated tabs that prevent tracking as you browse, since so many sites have social media plugins/ads that help collect data for Facebook and other apps.

You can tell Firefox to fence in Facebook in the browser preferences. Also a good time to change your search engine to DuckDuckGo and leave Google search behind (or only use it with another browser that’s separate from daily use).

The EFF (OP of the tweet) has various types of privacy tools that they’ve created. Some are browser plugins. I recommend going to their site to learn more about internet privacy and advocacy (and donating a few bucks if you can spare it). https://www.eff.org/pages/tools

Also reminder that a lot of browsers like Opera run on the Chromium structure. ...Which is just Chrome, essentially. It will do the exact same thing as Chrome, wrt your privacy. Switch to Firefox today!

genuinely concerned about how little queer history thats getting through to the younger members of the community. literally saw teenagers talking about how talking about pronouns wasn't a thing until 2020??? horrifying to think that they seem to insist queer culture didn't exist until they found it.

the fucking attack helicopter joke has been around since 2014!! leslie feinberg was born in 1949 and ze used ze/hir pronouns and obviously made comics about hir and hir communities identity and life! phalloplasty was first described in 1938!! christine jorgensen had surgery in the 50s to transition and published her biography in the 60s! even in the 1800s writers were talking about the need for *gender neutral* pronouns in both fiction and nonfiction!

yes, social media has let trans and queer people spread more knowledge about pronouns and identity, but acting like none of it even existed till the 2010s or even sooner is... concerning.

our older generations died, but that doesn't mean the knowledge has to die too! do not ignore and diminish the people before you.

i hope the zoomers on this website are reading these posts and taking them back to their same-age peergroups but im also not mad AT young people for not knowing stuff. queer history has been brutally erased over and over and over again and we're just recovering from the latest erasure as best we can. you cant know what you dont know if you dont know it

So apparently i had to find out by accident today that stickbug eggs look like tiny pots and they hatch out by opening the lids and crawling out

Moment of silence to the whole lands, whole languages, whole cultures, whole peoples that did not survive the terror of European colonialism and bless all those who have and continue to survive it’s long standing impact and oppression all of the world.

Only PC players will understand 😔

I spammed crouch to greet my fiance earlier and sticky keys lagged my computer so hard that I died

september 8, 2022

YES SHE DID

parasite in chief and her idiot corpse

tiktok age-protects cock jokes unless u send ur drivers license/passport to prove ur over 21. kill everyone now

this is what their support sent me. doesnt help every social media is copying tiktok atm the future of the web looks so grim rn. interent anonymity is in critical condition

I feel like signs like this of where the web is going are the number one sign to delete accounts on sites like TikTok and start using places that prioritize privacy even if their methods are imperfect. Any nugget of privacy you can get is crucial now.

Install duckduckgo and decentraleyes, use signal or element instead of discord for sensitive discussions, try not to post your face or name at all, and if you do don't do so extensively.

Make a DRM free music repository and for the love of God install an adblocker, hell if you have the free time make your own website and rss feed!

Make the web work for you instead of being a passive product. If a forum or site asked for like my id or passport to prove I was able to register or access parts of it a few years back I would think it's identity theft, and now it's just something that people view as fuckin everyday shit. Christ!!!

And uninstall TikTok! Uninstall Facebook Instagram any shit unless u know what you're getting into and put up several layers to stop tracking. Like. God. Dystopic shit here.

Tiktok shares your data more than any other social media app — and it’s unclear where it goes, study says (source: CNBC, Feb 8, 2022)

US lawmakers told by House of Representatives that TikTok is 'high risk' and that they should avoid using it due to privacy concerns (source: Business Insider, August 2022)

How Tiktok data mining works (and the third party data scraping you probably don't know about) (source: MakeUseOf, April 2022)

TikTok algorithm pushes violent videos to people of color, lawsuit says (source: The Seattle Times, July 2022) [[Note: Why is it bad that they profile their users? This]]

Tiktok lawsuit from the families of 7 kids killed attempting the Blackout Challenge, which the families say the algorithm pushed at their children (source: TheVerge, July 2022) [[Note: why is it bad to give them your age? This]]

Even Reddit's CEO calls Tiktok fundamentally parasitic and is nervous about its security (source: Techcrunch, 2020) [[Note: Just sayin']]

Look, use it if you like, there's fun stuff on there, but know what you're getting into and take precautions.

I want to say this bc it does not get said enough: most grief you experience in your life will have NOTHING to do with death.

This is not talked about enough and as a result ppl struggle to process grief bc the world is telling them that grief is something else.

Grief is about loss, and IF you’d like to define it as a loss of life it is not restricted to loss of life via death. Even then I’d implore you to not view grief as about death or life but again, just loss.

Grief is also about having a shitty childhood that nothing can fix even if you have healed from it as an adult; your childhood was shitty and there’s nothing retroactively you can do about it. You grieve the loss of thriving your past self was denied.

Grief is about friendships that ended abruptly, confusingly and again, there’s nothing you can do to change that. You just have to sit with it. This is the only way grief can ultimately be processed and all it wants by the way: to be accepted and sat with. That’s it.

Grief is about opportunities that have passed, experiences you can’t have because of the way situations have ended up, and having to accept that while you do have your whole future ahead of you, there were some things you wanted to be a certain way then and they weren’t, aren’t and will never be.

Grief is being estranged from your family and missing family closeness even though you do not want to be closer to your parents, because you’re grieving the fact that there is a healthy part of human life you will not experience through them.

Grief can be the job you lost, the plans that fell through, the events that spiraled out of your control

If grief is strictly about life and death, understand that it includes grieving the life you never had and the death of who you used to be, too.

But moreover, grief is about loss.

—–

If my writing helps you consider > donating here,<  as FOSTA/SESTA has taken most of my income and I need support as I finish school so I can establish my work.

A kind person whose social justice vocabulary is outdated or inadequate for the concepts they’re trying to communicate is a better person than anyone who’d rip them down as a bigot for not keeping up with the euphemism treadmill. Morality is measured by how you treat people, not how well you’ve memorized a continuously evolving set of shibboleths.

if you don’t use bandcamp, i’d really encourage you to spend some time there. there’s millions of artists on there putting out great material, a lot of which never even makes 1 sale, or breaks 10 plays

if you’re new to the site, the front page is a good place to start. you can pick a genre and scroll thru it. by default it puts popular stuff up front, but i’d suggest looking at new releases

most albums have a “music you’ll also love” section at the bottom of the page, so you can start from one thing and go down a rabbit hole. you can find whole scenes this way

or look at the genre tags that don’t show up on the front page! find a sub-subgenre and explore something you’ve definitely never heard before. what’s furrycore? dreamcore? post-hyperpop? progressive extreme metal? melodic juke?

bandcamp also tags music by location. what are ppl in your city making?

going out of your way to find new music can make an artist’s day, or turn you on to something you wouldn’t normally go for. think about it

i didnt mention one of the site’s biggest selling points, which is that the money u spend on there goes directly to the artist. bandcamp gets a 30% cut, which is beyter than any other deal out there. definitely better than the 99.99% cut spotify takes.

but that was on purpose. i wanna let ppl know that bandcamp is the place to be, as a music fan, if you want to hear underground independent music

bandcamp is kinda in danger of being only used by musicians. like an extension of the joke abt irl gigs: it’s just a bunch of musicians handing each other 20 dollar bills.

to me, as someone who loves the wierd, edgy side of electronic music, bandcamp is more than that. it’s where u go to be part of music scenes in the internet era. especially post 2020

indie musicians and laptop musicians and garage musicians and local musicians are making the best damn songs youve never heard rn

you can also plug your spotify playlists into this tool called Merch Table to find artists on there who have bandcamps — it’s a great way to get started owning and compensating artists for the music you already listen to and love!

another important tidbit is bandcamp fridays! on these designated days, 93% of your money reaches the label/ artist. when you buy on any other day, an average of 82% reaches the label/ artist. already awesome and made even BETTER on bandcamp fridays.

isitbandcampfriday.com has a timer for when the next BC friday is!

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth (1891-1978)

if you want to actually truly support autistic rights, you need to accept the fact that many autistics will forever and unchangeably be wildly socially incompetent, and this does not make them bad or dangerous.

like, seriously.

you need to accept that autistics will:

and autistics can't just "act normal," can't just "learn" to not do these things, and you need to understand that this doesn't make autistics dangerous, doesn't mean autistics need to be isolated from the rest of society, certainly doesn't make autistics fucking predators like so many so-called leftists are keen to brand autistic behavior as.

like, portraying social incompetence as inherently predatory and evil is ableism and its fucking rampant in left spaces, and it's genuinely fucking horrifying! between this and frankly horrifying anti-intellectual-disability sentiment and the overall refusal to make irl organizing spaces physically accessible, leftie spaces have a massive fucking problem with refusing to unpack societal ableism baked into y'alls brains. disabled people have fucking nowhere to go other than to each other because the so called "inclusive" moments legitimately hate us and refuse to unpack why--oh it's just a coincidence that every autistic person i know is ostracised from most irl leftie and queer spaces for being "creepy"/having "bad vibes," certainly can't have anything to do with how all of society says we're all predatory and creepy and have bad vibes 🙄

This. All of this.

Also on the off-chance someone wants to suggest that this post is saying that you have to just let autistic people do whatever even if it makes you uncomfortable, no it’s not.

You are still allowed to have boundaries. You are still allowed to ask someone not to touch you a certain way, you are still allowed to not want to explain things that upset you. Autistic people are perfectly capable of respecting those boundaries if you voice them.

The thing they can’t learn is to “just know” because it’s “common sense.” Just be polite, be patient, and don’t assume intentions. Honestly, it’ll help you a lot with your allistic friends too.

No one is a mind reader.

Nintendo Magazine System Australia #17, Aug ‘94 - ‘Kid Clown’ preview.

I got somethins to say

i already fED you

IRRELEVANT

i know that “don’t harass people for being weird, they might be autistic!” is a fairly popular take on here. but as a Certified Autist, i’d like to add that harassing allistic and/or neurotypical people for being weird is also bad, and should not be done

and before you come in with “yeah, you never know who is and isn’t autistic, and you shouldn’t force people to out themselves!” i want to say two things: one, i agree. and two, even if you could magically avoid ever harassing a single autistic person, it still wouldn’t be okay to go after NTs for being weird. they’re people, janice. they’re allowed to be really invested in naruto

#stop playing the game of ‘who is it okay for me to hurt?’ #the answer is no one #the answer is ALWAYS going to be no one #none people is the correct number of people to hurt [X]

Some "helpful" reviews, in case anyone is on the fence about watching The Sandman:

Here’s the thing. For everyone whining that they made the Sandman TV adaptation ‘extra gay for no reason.’

These comics were published around the same time (1988) that Section 28 came into effect in Britain - a truly dystopian law that forbade “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” or any kind of ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by any local authorities - it was deliberately vague in order to empower bigots and scare advocates.

This is the context in which Sandman was published. And it was still - beautifully, wonderfully and deliberately - queer as fuck.

They have not changed any character’s sexuality in the show. All they have done is honour them, in a time where it could not be more important to do so. When laws like section 28 are on the rise once more.

Sandman is a story about expectation and legacy and family. It’s a rejection of grand narratives and false ideals. It’s about confronting the darkest parts of the world to find the truest version of yourself.

Of course queer people are carrying this story. We always have.

I'd just done a comic, with Bryan Talbot and Mark Buckingham, for the Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia (AARGH!) fundraising comic.

From 35 years away it could have been a whole lot better, but yes. This was the world we were making Sandman in...